Eyes of the Beholders
by Akatsuki210
Summary: These borrowed eyes reflect on shattered souls.  One shot, manga spoilers.


**Disclaimer:** My name is not Masashi Kishimoto, therefore I don't own _Naruto_ or any of its characters.

**Warning:** This story contains manga spoilers up to Chapter 550.

* * *

**Eyes of the Beholders**

Kakashi stood before the stone, having eyes for only one out of the many names written there. _Obito_, he promised, _I will put your gift to good use._ Rin squeezed his hand in a comforting way, and Minato placed one hand on his shoulder. Kakashi couldn't shake the feeling that Obito was going to pop out from behind a tree, apologizing for being late and coming up with some utterly unbelievable excuse to explain it.

OOOO

Itachi stood before the stone, eyes focused on the name carved neatly into the smooth surface. Sasuke clung to his leg, looking up at him in concern. A student at the Ninja Academy, he understood the meaning of death, but he couldn't quite understand why everyone was treating this particular death so differently from others. No one had told him that Shisui committed suicide, and he was too young to realize that such a skilled shinobi couldn't possibly drown by accident.

Itachi's parents were there as well. Mikoto had an arm around her older son's shoulders, while Fugaku stood rigidly by her side.

The loss of Shisui's eyes had been explained away as the action of scavengers in the river. Hearing this, his mother had pulled an entirely innocent crab off the corpse and crushed it under her heel. The sound made Itachi think that instead of the crab's shell cracking under her foot, it should be his bones.

_Shisui_, he thought, _I will use your gift to protect Konoha, as you would have wanted._

* * *

Over time, Kakashi found himself picking up some of Obito's habits. He vaulted down from the balcony of his apartment to street level, instead of simply taking the stairs. He ordered his ramen as spicy as he could stand it. And he always arrived late, to everything, with an outrageous excuse at the ready.

It wasn't something he had consciously intended to do, and he sometimes wondered why he was doing it. Was a part of his subconscious mind trying to keep his friend's memory alive in this way? Or was it the influence of Obito's eye? It had a bit of his chakra, after all, and what was chakra but the substance of a person's soul?

OOOO

Itachi had never really just sat and stared at the clouds before. Shisui did it often, a habit he claimed to have picked up from his sensei as a genin. Whenever he convinced Itachi to sit with him while he gazed up into the sky, Itachi would in fact be going over mission details and battle plans in his head. But since Shisui's death, he somehow found it easier to simply empty his mind and let the clouds drift across his field of vision than he ever had while Shisui was alive.

* * *

The day Rin died, Kakashi locked himself in his bedroom and didn't come out for almost four days after. Asuma pounded on the door and called his name, Gai stood under the window and bellowed comforting words, and Kurenai slipped notes under the door.

Kakashi ignored them all. He just sat on his bed with his arms wrapped around his knees, while tears streamed down only the left side of his face.

OOOO

"See, that wasn't so bad, was it?" Itachi was sure there was a mocking smile on Madara's face, even if he couldn't see it behind the mask. "I must say, I'm surprised you didn't take me up on my offer to deal with your parents for you. Although I suppose, compared to Shisui, even that must have been easy-"

Itachi whirled, the tomoe in his eyes merging into a pinwheel shape, and black flames erupted on the mask Madara habitually wore. The air around him seemed to distort, and he disappeared. Itachi knew better than to hope this was a retreat or a defeat, and waited a few moments until Madara reappeared. His mask was gone, and his once-long hair had been cropped short, singed at the ends. "Hmm, I can't say I like this new hairstyle much. Ah well. Are you quite finished now, Itachi-kun?"

Itachi stalked off without a word. Behind him, he heard Madara ripping some cloth from his shirt to cover his face with.

* * *

"A ninja who won't protect his friends is even worse than trash." Kakashi repeated Obito's words to team after team as they failed his test and were sent back to the Academy. _It's better this way_, he thought, looking at their crestfallen faces. _If they learn that lesson before they go into battle, maybe they won't lose what I did._

OOOO_  
_

Itachi paused, hearing a disturbance in the street that intersected his own. He veered off towards the sound, his feet somehow failing to splash in the puddles created by the ever-present rain.

There was a corpse in the street, and three shinobi huddled nearby. They were young, probably about his own age. One was kneeling on the ground, shoulders heaving, having just been violently sick. His teammates leaned over him, one sheltering him from the rain and the other rubbing his back.

"I killed him," the boy whispered. "I killed him, I've never killed anyone before, I killed him, oh Pain-sama forgive me I killed him..."

"You did the right thing, Okura," said one of his teammates, a girl. "He was a spy, he would have given information about us to Hanzou if we'd let him get away."

The male teammate nodded. "You probably saved some of our people just now."

Okura only shook his head. He looked like he was trying very hard not to throw up again.

"They are right," Itachi said, a bit surprised to hear the words leaving his mouth. He rarely even talked to his comrades in Akatsuki, let alone strangers. "A ninja is someone who protects the peace of their village from the shadows. We commit violence in order to prevent more violence. That is a contradiction that lies at the heart of what we are, and everyone who takes up the name of shinobi must come to terms with it in their own way."

It wasn't until later that he realized those were exactly the words Shisui had spoken to him the first time he had killed.

* * *

Kakashi stared into the mirror as the sun went down. The changing light cast varying shades of gold, orange, and red over his face, until finally the sun sank below the horizon altogether. For a time afterward, Kakashi could see nothing. Then, his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he caught sight of his reflection once more. With so little ambient light, the vibrant crimson of his left eye had dulled to the dark red of dried blood.

_You're not completely dead_, he thought as he looked into Obito's eye. _Part of you still lives in me._

OOOO_  
_

Itachi stared at the crow on Naruto's shoulder, at Shisui's eye looking back at him.

"The battle's that way," Naruto said, pointing. "We'd better go help!"

Killer Bee nodded. "Our friends need us, so we oughta go!" He turned to Itachi. "What about you, are you coming, bro?"

"In a moment," Itachi replied, and stretched out one hand. The crow took flight and glided over to him, landing gracefully on the hand he'd extended. Itachi unsummoned the crow, and it disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving the implanted eye behind in his palm. With his other hand, Itachi reached up and dug two fingers into his own eye socket. The analytical part of his mind registered its interest at the lack of pain as he gouged out the eye and placed Shisui's eye carefully in the empty socket before the Edo Tensei could regenerate a new one.

"That was kinda gross, I guess," Killer Bee opined. "But if it makes you stronger, it's for the best."

"Let's _go_!" Naruto exclaimed. He didn't wait for their answer before sprinting off in the direction of the fighting.

Itachi followed, looking down at his reflection in the water as they crossed a river. _You're not completely dead_, he thought in the brief moment that he looked into Shisui's eye. _Part of you still lives in me._

* * *

**A/N:** After reading Chapter 550, I was thinking about the similarities between Itachi and Kakashi. Both gained the MS after losing their best friend, both were bequeathed one of said best friend's eyes, both were highly influenced by their deceased friend's outlook and worldview. It just seemed really interesting, and I wanted to explore that idea with a story.

Plus, I couldn't not write something after Itachi BROKE OUT OF EDO TENSEI. Seriously, that is one of the most badass things to happen in the entire series.

I'm not really sure what happened to Nagato prior to the last scene in this story. Maybe Naruto dusted him, or Itachi sealed him with the Sword of Totsuka.

Thanks for reading!


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